short and insightful writing about a long and complex history

The Points Interview — Howard Padwa

Editor’s Note: “For an otherwise law abiding morphine addict struggling to overcome addiction in the late 1920s, Britain was a more welcoming place than France.” So begins Howard Padwa’s Social Poison: The Culture and Politics of Opiate Control in Britain and France, 1821-1926(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). A graduate of the University of Delaware, Padwa continued his studies at the London School of Economics and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris before securing a doctorate in history from UCLA. In our interview, Padwa highlights the place of differing conceptions of proper membership in a national community as a deep source of Britain’s and France’s differential responses to illicit drugs.

1. Describe your book in terms your mother (or the average mother-in-the-street) could understand.

I started with two simple questions: First, why did opiates become so tightly controlled in the early twentieth century? Second, were the reasons the same everywhere? While a lot of scholars have looked at these questions, most have focused on studying things either globally (why did drugs become tightly controlled everywhere), or nationally (why did drugs become tightly controlled in this country or that country). In Social Poison I blended these approaches, looking at things internationally, but with a detailed focus on two countries (Great Britain and France).

As for the first question—why did opiates become so tightly controlled? I approached this question by looking at what people were afraid would happen if they didn’t control opiates. What would society look like if everyone could use them as much as they liked whenever they liked? I found that two fears were particularly common in the nineteenth century. First, people feared that opiates would take a toll on physical and mental health, eventually making users unable to care for themselves or contribute to society. Second, they feared that people who used opiates would essentially “tune out” of society, neglecting their duties to their friends, families, and countrymen when they were under the influence. In both cases, what made opiate use problematic was not just that use was considered “immoral,” but also that it seemed to compromise users’ abilities to act as good citizens. Drug use was understood as more than just a medical or psychological disorder—it was also a threat to the normal functioning of social relationships.

This led to the second question—were the reasons drugs became tightly controlled the same everywhere? The kind of social problem opiate use could become depended, to a large degree, on how “society” was defined. In Britain, where the national community was imagined as individuals functioning in a free market, fears focused on the impact drug use could have on self-sufficiency and commerce. In France, on the other hand, the nation was understood in a more collectivistic way, and engagement of citizens with society was considered most important. So, in the French context, fears that drugs would make users disengaged or disloyal were much stronger. Each country developed its own specific brand of what I call “anti-narcotic nationalism”—reasons for opposing drug use that were particular both to opiates and to specific national concerns.

Anti-narcotic nationalism went beyond the ways that the British and French talked about opiate use in the nineteenth century; it also influenced the development of drug control in the early twentieth century. In Britain, concerns about the effect the drug trade could have on commerce facilitated the landmark piece of legislation that established opiate control on the British mainland during World War I. In France, concerns about drug use, treason, military discipline, and national security were the driving forces behind drug control initiatives that took effect in 1908 and 1916. Once drug control was established, anti-narcotic nationalism also influenced how British and French authorities treated their addicted citizens. In Britain, when it became clear that opiate use was not necessarily incompatible with self-sufficiency or productivity, the government sanctioned maintenance treatment for some addicts. In France, on the other hand, associations of drug control with national security remained in place, as did strict regulations limiting the provision of drugs to confirmed addicts.

2. What do you think a bunch of drug and alcohol historians might find particularly interesting about your book?

The connections I found between drug discourses, political culture, and drug policies are interesting. Many historians studying drugs in the pre-World War II era have studied these things separately, but few have made explicit connections between cultural understandings of drug use, national ideals of citizenship, and the actual policies that states enacted to limit drug use. Political culture bridges the gap between cultural representations of drugs and actual drug policy. Literary and medical writings helped define what it meant to use opiates; political culture established the context within which these meanings came to be seen as socially threatening; and drug policies were societies’ defenses against these threats. From other studies we know that institutional dynamics, health and welfare traditions, approaches towards civil liberties, and the social status of drug using populations all influence the way that states approach the drug problem. What Social Poison shows is that national identity and national ideals of citizenship also play key roles in shaping drug policy.

Howard Padwa

3. Now that the hard part is over, what is the thing YOU find most interesting about your book?

The most interesting thing for me was seeing what policymakers were actually thinking about as they were writing the first drug laws. Coming into the project, I expected to find that government ministers were like old schoolmarms, obsessed with protecting public health, safety, and virtue from the “evils” of drugs. While they were to an extent, it was interesting to see that they were also concerned with things we don’t normally associate with the drug problem—things like commercial shipping and espionage. It seems that limiting drug use wasn’t always the ultimate goal of what they were trying to do with these regulations, and that drug control was more a means to an end than an end in and of itself.

4. Every research project leaves some stones unturned. What stone from your book are you most curious to see turned over soon?

Most of Social Poison focused on how drug abuse was correlated with poor citizenship; an interesting flipside of this is that in recent years, many in the addiction treatment community have started to consider improved “citizenship” an essential element of recovery. Poor citizenship was implicitly associated with the disease, and now good citizenship is explicitly linked with the cure. What exactly is the connection between citizenship and recovery, and how has it evolved? This is a stone I would like to see turned over soon…

5. BONUS QUESTION: In an audio version of this book, who should provide the narration?